Senate passes postal service bill

The Senate passed S. 1789, the bill generally reported to be aimed at "saving" or "fixing" the postal service, by a vote of 62-37 Wednesday. Less widely reported were the origins of the postal service's problems in a crisis manufactured by Congress and exacerbated less by the shift online than by the recession. The Senate bill buys the postal service some time before the worst proposed post office and processing center closures, cuts to delivery and lengthened delivery times, and jobs cuts can begin to kick in. But while it prevents postal executives from kicking off an immediate death spiral, it doesn't create the conditions for the postal service's success by reversing the conditions that manufactured the crisis to begin with.

The Senate's bill would bar the postal service from ending Saturday mail delivery for two years, keeps overnight first-class mail delivery for some mail sent short distances while allowing longer delivery times over greater distances, prevents pre-Election Day closures in states that vote by mail, and prevents the closure of post offices if there are no other post offices within 10 miles, among other things.

Economist Dean Baker wrote earlier in the week that:

The certain effect of this bill is to cut 100,000 jobs over the next three years. This is somewhat better than the 200,000 job loss that would result from a bill being pushed by Representative Darrell Issa and the House Republicans, but any final bill is likely to end up somewhere in the middle. If we assume 150,000 lost jobs, that is equivalent to more than 5 weeks of job growth at the March rate.

Some amendments passed after Baker's writing may slightly blunt or delay those effects, but the bill remains substantially as he described it. The House has yet to take up its own bill.